Moshe Kahtan was just under 3 years old when rioters ransacked the Jewish community in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1941, but he still has vivid memories from that day.

“When people started banging on our door, we went up on our roof, and my parents threw me across the roof to another apartment to save me,” Kahtan, now 88, recalled. “Our landlord was a Muslim, but he wasn’t raised in hatred like others of that generation, so he went out to the street in front of our building with a gun, and said he would shoot anyone who tried to attack the Jews inside.”

“Even now, many years later, I still get flashbacks,” he added.

During the two-day pogrom that started on June 1, 1941, Arab mobs went on a violent rampage of murder, theft and rape that killed some 180 Jews, wounded more than 1,000, and destroyed hundreds of homes.

The pogrom, known as the Farhud (an Arabic term for “violent dispossession”), is sometimes referred to as the Holocaust in Iraq, and marked the beginning of the end of the nearly 2,000-year history of Jews in Iraq, historians say.

But despite the significance of the riot to the Mizrahi Jewish community, most Israelis still lack awareness about it, according to David Kahtan, Moshe’s son.

“It’s only recently that the Farhud is starting to become known in Israeli society,” Kahtan said. “But it’s 85 years too late.”

The younger Kahtan is working on changing that. A year after the television broadcast of the documentary he produced about the history of Iraqi Jewry, he led the creation of a memorial ceremony at Beit HaNassi, the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, marking the anniversary of the Farhud.

Some 200 people attended the first-of-its-kind event, including many survivors who arrived with their families to pass on their stories. At the entrance, one young woman gently teased her grandfather that his identity card was too old, and that he wouldn’t be admitted by the guards.

David Kahtan, who grew up in the UK and speaks better English than Hebrew, is working to record the testimonies of survivors before they die. Alongside the ceremony is a photo display he organized of more than 85 survivors, photographed by........

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